Cambridge professor wants to re-brand those classed as evil to people who 'lack empathy'... even if they're mass murderers

Investigation: Cambridge professor and author Simon Baron-Cohen is dissatisfied with the word 'evil'

A Cambridge University professor has been battling with evil all his life.

And now Simon Baron-Cohen has decided that it is not good enough to call those who commit acts of violence, from street brawls to murders and even genocide, 'evil'.

Instead the professor, who teaches psychology and psychiatry, wants evil to be re-branded as a lack of empathy.

This, he argues, is a condition that can be measured and monitored and is susceptible to education and treatment.

People who commit atrocities tend to have low to no empathy levels and should be seen as sick, or 'disabled' rather than evil, Baron-Cohen argues.

We should seek to understand why they have such an empathy deficiency and help them replace it, he adds.

'I'm not satisfied with the term 'evil',' says Baron-Cohen, who is also one of the world's top experts in autism and developmental psychopathology.

'We've inherited this word and we use it to express our abhorrence when people do awful things, usually acts of cruelty, but I don't think it's anything more than another word for doing something bad.

'And as a scientist that doesn't seem to me to be much of an explanation. So I've been looking for an alternative - we need a new theory of human cruelty."

Baron-Cohen, who is also director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge, has just written a book in which he calls for a kind of re-branding of evil to offer a more scientific explanation for why people kill and torture, or have such great difficulty understanding the feelings of others.

In the book, entitled Zero Degrees of Empathy in Britain, and The Science of Evil in the U.S, Baron-Cohen seeks to pick apart and define components of empathy - including hormones, genes, environment, nurture, and early childhood experiences.

Not evil? Adolf Hitler was responsible for millions of Jewish people's deaths, left, while one of America's most notorious serial killers, Theodore Ted Bundy, is suspected of murdering up to 50 women

Terror mastermind: Many would call Osama bin Laden evil but Baron-Cohen says even those who commit heinous crimes like mass murder can be rehabilitated

Citing decades of scientific research, he says there are at least 10 regions of the brain which make up what he calls the 'empathy circuit'.

When people hurt others, either systematically or fleetingly, parts of that circuit are malfunctioning.

Baron-Cohen also sets out an 'empathy spectrum' ranging from zero to six degrees of empathy, and an 'empathy quotient' test, whose score puts people on various points along that spectrum.

Drawing a classic bell curve on a graph, Baron-Cohen says that thankfully, the vast majority of humans are in the middle of the bell-curve spectrum, with a few particularly attuned and highly empathetic people at the top end.

Psychopaths, narcissists, and people with borderline personality disorder sit at the bottom end of the scale - these people have 'zero degrees of empathy'

Baron-Cohen defines empathy in two parts:

As the drive to identify another person's thoughts and feelings, and the drive to respond appropriately to those thoughts and feelings.

It is also, he says, one of the most valuable resources in our world - one which is currently woefully underused.

'We all have degrees of empathy but perhaps we are not using it to its full potential,' he explained.

Relations: Baron-Cohen cites the meeting of minds between Nelson Mandela, right, and the then South African president F W de Klerk, left, which helped end apartheid in the early 1990s as an example of how empathy can work

He says erosion of empathy is an important global issue that affects the health of communities, be they small ones like families, or big ones like nations.

If we all used our ability to empathise more, and recognised its value, he says, conflicts such as the decades of tit-for-tat violence between Palestinians and Israelis could be resolved.

Explanations: Baron-Cohen discusses his theories in his new book out in the U.S. in July

'If you think about conflict resolution at the moment, usually we are dependent on diplomatic channels, legal frameworks, or military methods.

'But all those things operate at a very abstract level and they don't seem to get us very far.

'Empathy is about two people - two people meeting, getting to know each other and tuning in to what the other person is thinking and feeling.'

As an example, Baron-Cohen cites the meeting of minds between Nelson Mandela and the then South African president F W de Klerk, which helped end apartheid in the early 1990s.

'The progress that came out of just that one relationship - well, arguably, it broke through where all other methods had failed, and at far less cost in terms of human life,' he says.

Baron-Cohen shies away from saying that psychopaths can be 'cured' of extreme behaviour, but he argues strongly against locking them up and saying there is nothing society can do.

'I try to keep an open mind. I would never want to say a person is beyond help,' he explains.

'Empathy is a skill like any other human skill - and if you get a chance to practise, you can get better at it.